HURRICANE RITA
As I blog this entry (Friday night), Hurricane Rita is hovering around the Texas Coast, but it looks like she will hit around Beaumont, instead of Galveston, which is closer to where I live -- San Antonio.
We have spent the past day and a half near radio, TV or computer, experiencing a variety of emotions. Incredulity that this hurricane is bigger, and might hit New Orleans again. Thinking that's not a bad idea, because of the shape the city is in, and (we understand) the people are all out of there. Then feeling guilty about that. One of my friends pinpointed the place along the Texas coast least inhabited and prayed it would hit there.
We've reminisced about past hurricanes in our area. We're pretty far inland, but there are always effects. (We hear we will have a wind advisory tomorrow, but no rain).
We've talked about the panic and hoarding. I called my cousin in Round Rock, north of Austin, 100 miles from here, and she said the grocery store shelves were bare. However, some of the evacuees from Houston and Galveston had arrived in Round Rock last night, and we presumed it might just be more people buying food than usual, not hoarding and stock-piling.
While the world is still reeling from the effects of Katrina, we're now bracing for something that could be just as bad, or worse. And individually, having recovered from the effects of various "crises" in our lives, we shared our resilience and our tales.
"You've never seen a line at a gas station," said Martha. "You should've been in North Carolina in the early 70's. I sat in a line for an hour."
"Yeah," said Tom. "My cousin got married in Houston in the 80s and the men took turns taking everyone's car to the gas station so we could get to the reception and wedding and back home. I'll never forget that."
"To me," said Tina, "this is a crisis. We used to get stranded in the Corpus Christi airport at Christmas time. My son was two months old. I was running out of formula and diapers."
"Well, they always have milk in the restaurants," said Bill.
"There were no restaurants in airports back then," said Tina. "That's a crisis -- your baby starving."
The older folks had more stories, and they were also more calm. We learn resilience through life's adversities, and we learn staying power from elders. Grandmas never seem to panic over the same things as Moms do. They've usually seen worse. LOTS worse.
"Things will be fine," said the Elder Statesman of the Group. "They always are."
"Everything always turns out for the best," added Stewart.
"Well," I added, because this is how I see it, "something good always comes from everything."
There ensued a short discussion of whether "things always turn out for the best."
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From my standpoint, as an emotional intelligence coach, I think it's your call. Some people suffer adversity and are the worse for it. Something good doesn't come from it, and things definitely don't turn out for the best in the end.
They become "victims," bitter and cynical. Sometimes it's expressed as hostility, sometimes as depression. They live in a negative world and attract negative people and situations, digging themselves deeper into their black holes. Their response to the adversity is "why me?" and "it's an evil world," or "I have bad karma," and they add a much larger adversity to the original one. They attack before they're attacked, and ward off kindness with suspicion.
A loved one dies and they harden their hearts and never love again. They suffer a job loss and hate "bosses" from then on. Someone cheats them one time on a contract and they decide no one is ever to be trusted again. They fail to get into the college of their dreams and they decide the world is forever against them.
If you have positive messages about adversity and resilience, I hope you'll share them with others at such times. I think of the times my little world was shaken when I was a kid -- my parents were upset about something -- and I would run to my grandmother. She'd be sitting there smiling and would say, "Everything's fine," and pull me up into her lap. When I was a teenager, and my heart had been broken, my mom wasn't sure what to say or do, but my grandmother knew. "There'll be another train along soon," she would say, and just smile.
It wasn't what she said. It was how she was. She had endured much adversity in her lifetime, and knew that we can survive nearly anything if we keep our spirits up and our hope alive.
"IF IT ISN'T A HURRICANE IT WILL BE SOMETHING ELSE," she would say. "THERE'S ALWAYS SOMETHING COMING ALONG BUT YOU'LL BE FINE. NOW GET BACK TO YOUR READING, DEAR. LIFE GOES ON."
Resilience is an EQ competency that can be learned. We learn it by approaching the adversity in our life in a certain way. The good news is it can be learned. The bad news is that you'll have lots of opportunities. Or you could reverse those two. However, your life is what you make of it, and people who are happy are generally happy because they've decided to be, not because they have any more reason than you and I, or any less.
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